The Fall of Rome

In the year 410 CE, a rumor moved through the Mediterranean world that seemed literally impossible. Rome had been sacked. The city that had not fallen to a foreign enemy in eight hundred years, the city whose name was synonymous with civilization itself, had been breached. Jerome, a Christian scholar writing from Bethlehem, captured the shock in a single sentence: "The city which had taken the whole world was itself taken."

The man who took it was Alaric, king of the A Germanic people who migrated into the Roman Empire during the fourth and fifth centuries CE. Originally settled as federates within Roman territory, the Visigoths sacked Rome under Alaric in 410 CE and eventually established a kingdom in Gaul and Hispania. They represent one of the most significant of the so-called barbarian groups that reshaped the Western Roman Empire.. His troops spent three days looting the city before withdrawing south. They took gold, silver, and hostages, including the emperor's half-sister. They did not burn Rome to the ground. They did not massacre its inhabitants. By the standards of ancient warfare, the sack was almost restrained — but the psychological damage was total.

For centuries afterward, thinkers would ask: How did the greatest empire the Western world had ever known come to this? The question haunted Augustine, who wrote The City of God partly in response. It haunted Edward Gibbon, who spent decades in the eighteenth century composing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It haunts us still, because we recognize in Rome's story something uncomfortably familiar: a superpower that seemed too big, too established, too permanent to fail.